Month: March 2015

Quelab had an open house on Saturday called Hack All The Things. It was an amazing event and I ran a CoderDojo ABQ promotion were we got kids programming on Scratch and my Netduino. I should have gotten pictures and tweeted and done more promotion, but I was having too much fun. I did get one picture of the Hackable fridge Quelab won.

Intel provided Quelab with several Edisons for people to hack on. I was able to get to borrow one and hope to do some Internet Of Things projects and also write simply tutorials for Edison, similar to ones I used at the CoderDojo for the Netduino, which I will post online soon.

Finally, CoderDojo ABQ is happening April 11th and it will continue to occur at Quelab every 2nd and 4th Sunday from 10 – Noon. There has been amazing support from the people of Quelab and this should be a great event. Make sure to register at the website if you are interested.

This reminded me of my Netduino 1, which I got for cheap and discovered the reason it was cheap is it was becoming obsolete. It only officially works with Visual Studio 2010, which I never bothered to install after upgrading to Windows 8 and so I haven’t used it for some time.

I thought I could get it working on newer software now that there had been more focus on .Net Micro Framework (progress seemed to have stalled) and the fact that the free community edition of Visual Studio 2013 was the full version and has full support for plugins. After piecing together information from different parts of the web I got it to work.My initial setup:

The main trick that it took me a long time to figure out, was that you have to install both Netduino SDKs. The 4.2.2 has the drivers for the Netduino and the 4.3.1 allows it to work with Visual Studio 2013.

Creating a Project and Testing:

Plug in the Netduino and it will attempt to install the device.

It should find the driver, if it doesn’t have it search for the driver at C:\Program Files (x86)\Secret Labs\Netduino SDK

Next open of MFDeploy, switch the Device to “USB” and the Netduino should be listed. You can ping the Netduino and and get its information by going to the Target menu and choosing Device Capabilities.

Close MFDeploy and open Visual Studio 2013.

Create a New Project and choose the Netduino 1 Application

Open the properties of your project and under the Application section change the Target framework to .Net Micro Framework 4.1 (or whatever version your Netduino is running).

Under the .Net Micro Framework section make sure the Transport is USB and the Device has your Netduino selected.

Now you can write code and deploy it the NetDuino. If you need a quick sample to test run this:

The biggest thing happening is SXSW where a bunch of Albuquerque entrepreneurs, leaders and companies are. Newscastic has a channel setup called ABQ2SXSW which has a great profile on all the Scrappy Startup winners that are currently in Austin. Here is a Twitter list to follow yourself or use #ABQ2SXSW

I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get a page setup with Github. The other weekend I went to setup a Github repository for the upcoming CoderDojo ABQ and decided to use the Github Pages feature to get some information up and running.

I found a CoderDojo that was already on Github, whose format I liked. I forked it, renamed it and had a page up.

Next I downloaded the windows client, grabbed a copy of the repository and loaded up new imagery and put up some quick content. Committed it and I now you can see CoderDojoAbq. This took me about an hour and I still don’t really know Git at all, but I extremely impressed with how easy it was to get something nice setup. I was also impressed with the Windows client. I didn’t read any documentation and only knew the basics about how the Github pages functioned, everything was just natural and smooth.

My next plan is to get a tutorial up for how to fork and change the site and the push the changes to the official site (I’ll have to learn how to do this first). Ideally, the students themselves will be able to update the website with their own projects or add features and designs.

I started this blog with the intention of writing about the city and the exciting events happening. The only way I got this site up was to force myself to not worry about how imperfect it was. I can spend hours rewriting sentences, fixing css, changing themes, installing plugins, and never get any content up. In fact I have done that before with previous attempts at blogging.

I decided I would take the advice of given to startups all the time and just launch and fix things as I go without obsessing about it being perfect. In addition to this blog, I also planned to start a personal blog as a place to put up coding projects and my thoughts that weren’t focused on Albuquerque. However, I cringe at the thought of setting up another site, so I am just going to start putting my programming projects and thoughts on this page too. Pivoting? 😉

Albuquerque, tech, and a bunch of programming!

Even though I am going to not focus on things being perfect, if you see an error or something that can be fixed, let me know.